As the technology environment becomes more closely aligned with business strategies, optimizing information technology (IT) infrastructure investments and improving overall system availability and utilization become increasingly central to marketplace success. Today more than ever before, it is critical to reduce the cost and complexity and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of data centers, servers, desktops, and other key computing infrastructure.
In today's highly diverse multi-vendor computer environments, reducing the complexity of managing information technology (IT) is critical for achieving cost-efficiency and productivity. System administrators need to identify and resolve problems quickly. Preventing problems from spreading throughout a computing environment is also important. Diagnosing root problem causes accurately and resolving emerging issues is vital to IT managers before the problems impact strategic business operations. In addition, system administrators need to do all of this with a constantly shrinking budget and workforce.
Support applications have been developed to address these urgent issues with remote troubleshooting and problem resolution capabilities for multi-platform, multi-operating system environments that are located anywhere in an organization from the desktop to the datacenter. For example, some software tool suites offer easy-to-use Web-based capabilities that address the support needs of both business and IT professionals for the data center, desktops, and the distributed computing environment.
For example, these support applications can provide proactive remote monitoring, diagnostics, and troubleshooting to help system administrators enhance the availability of Windows®, HP-UX®, and Linux servers, desktops, and storage devices. Additionally, these support products can help minimize costly downtime through automated diagnosis and remote support for desktop, mobile computing, printing, and tape storage problems.
In contrast to enterprise computing problems, end-users do not care about fast-evolving technologies. They do not understand that there are limited support resources and pressures to cut the total cost of ownership (TCO) for desktop computers. The end users simply want their computing devices to work. Some end users are even willing to fix easily addressed issues themselves, as long as they can rely on the system administrators to resolve the more complex problems.
Support applications can reduce the load on system administrators and IT staff by providing advanced capabilities that let end-users efficiently identify and address diverse desktop computer and printing problems on their own. Reporting systems can be included to provide seamless escalation to a corporate help desk in order to streamline the resolution of particularly complex issues.
Most support organizations do not operate this way because they lack intuitive end-user tools that are linked to help desk capabilities. Web-enabled support software fills this void by providing and connecting end-users and help desk solutions in multi-vendor environments.
One reason why such web-enabled support solutions are not widely used by organizations is because they can be difficult to deploy. Installing web-enabled support tools onto remote computers is a problem because businesses and corporations frequently disable administrative rights on end user desktop computers or datacenter servers in order to prevent unwanted applications from being launched on the computer from the Internet. For example, the downloading and launching of ActiveX controls, Java programs, and similar applications from the Internet are often disabled for security reasons. This type of policy helps protect computer networks against viruses, zombie applications, adware, spyware, and other threats. The drawback of this policy is that these restrictions also prevent end users from launching valuable web support applications from an Internet site. As a result, web services such as diagnostics, data harvesting, pre-scripted solutions, or similar applications cannot be delivered to an end user or remote server when such security restrictions are in place.